Panda paying late & stuff

Details on TNA’s recent issues with pay. There is said to be a lot of issues behind-the-scenes, as morale hit a new low due to many wrestlers and employees being behind on payment.

TNA’s top stars have contracts which state that they are paid a salary on the first of every month. The other talent work on per-show deals. Several of the biggest names were behind on pay, which is said to be growing into a major issue. Some of the wrestlers were over 30 days behind while others haven’t been paid for longer.

When Matt Hardy tweeted photos showing that he received five checks from TNA at once, it’s believed that it showed he was one of the performers who were owed quite a bit of money. Even if his intent may have been to show that TNA workers are being paid, it also shows that he was behind on getting his money.

As previously reported, Taz announced that he left TNA and thanked them for his time there. He was reportedly “way behind” on pay and refused to fly to Nashville to do post-production commentary due to his issues with the company.

TNA recently moved the payroll office from Nashville to Panda Energy’s home city of Dallas. Some people have used this as an excuse for the payment situation. However, TNA has actually been sending checks out of Dallas for a while now.

Meanwhile, word is that “the honeymoon is pretty much over” in regards to TNA’s relationship with Destination America. Discovery signed TNA as “an experiment”, hoping to add to DA’s lineup. TNA is easily the highest-rated show for Destination America, but Discovery isn’t happy that TNA can’t generate ad revenue. They were also expecting a larger amount of TNA’s audience from Spike TV to follow it during the move. That obviously didn’t happen. Destination America is available in 61.7% of the homes that Spike TV is in, but the new episodes of iMPACT! are only getting 30.2% of the audience that iMPACT! had last year. Even with the replay, it’s still bringing in less than half the viewers it had on Spike TV at this time last year.

While not stated in the story, although obvious, the same workers had not been paid for the most recent set of tapings either. We have independently confirmed the story is accurate.

The story also stated:

- One production team member was told by the company that the checks were cut on 4/3, but 14 days later, nobody had received them yet.- Production workers were not paid for the U.K. tour in late January until early this month, and claimed that, on average, the workers were shorted an average of $1,000 on pay for that tour.

There had been similar issues with late payment to the production people last year, which came to a head at a TV taping where things were finally settled.

In addition, Josh Eldridge, TNA's Content Manager for Digital and Social Media gave his two weeks notice and will be leaving the company for an outside offer.